Phyla of Joy

<div>Karen An-hwei Lee's third book is a beautiful and sustained meditation on the impermanence of humanity's essential components: memory spirituality emotion thought....Contemplative and linguistically sophisticatedPhyla of Joy is simply exquisite -'ink and stanza / flow like wind on grass.' - Rigoberto González<br> <br> There's an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word joy in our beleaguered world. In her new book Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion.<br> <br> In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea from bamboo-related famine to quasars the globe's minor seas and the nuptial flight of ants Phyla of Joy reaches toward ecstasy.<br></div>